Share
About Event
In 2023, we published a paper whose “story” made the cover page of the highly respected journal with the written take-home message. In it, we described a recently discovered protist with a uniquely altered genetic code, in which stop codons are scattered throughout its coding sequences – much like unexpected extra full-stops in sentences. Yet the story/genome behind these “sentences” was not lost, because this organism found a way to cope with this wholesale stop codon reassignment without prematurely terminating translation at these many in-frame stop codons. In the first part of my talk, I will extend this metaphor by showing what happens in human cells when we delicately interfere with the accurate selection of translation initiation start sites, i.e. the beginnings of these “sentences”. In short, we found that not only do they start a few words or half-words earlier or later, but they may also easily get lost in oblivion because an entirely different message overwrites them. In other words, we demonstrate how important it is to recognize the correct start of translation so that the correct messages are conveyed to the cells. In yet another hyperbole speaking, if this process malfunctions, the cell literally loses energy to deal with the resulting chaos! In the second part of my talk, I will uncover molecular details of the trick that our crazy protist devised to ignore the UGA stop signals in coding sequences. Let’s let the molecular Babylon speak for itself!
